Animating Lip-Sync

Adding a lip-sync to a project can really enhance its quality and storytelling. However, it can be difficult to shape a character's mouth to match the sound at a precise frame.

To solve this problem, Harmony provides a lip-sync feature which analyzes the contents of a sound element and generates a mouth chart (see below) based on the eight animation phonemes (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and X for silence).

The mouth shapes used by Harmony are based on the conventional mouth chart used in the animation industry.

NOTE: The letters used to represent the shapes do NOT correspond to an actual sound.

NOTE: If you are doing cut-out animation, refer to the Cut-out Animation Guide, Character Building chapter, "Adding Extra Drawings" topic to learn how to add extra drawings to your character.

Here is an approximation of the sound each mouth shape can produce:

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A: m, b, p, h

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B: s, d, j, i, k, t

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C: e, a

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D: A, E

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E: o

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F: u, oo

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G: f, ph

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X: Silence, undetermined sound

You can lip-sync the traditional way or let the system automatically create the basic detection.

You can refer to the mouth chart positions as you draw the shape of the character's mouth.

A progress bar appears while Harmony analyzes the selected sound clips and assigns a lip-sync letter to each sound cell.

Click the Map button to open the Lip-Sync Mapping dialog box.

From the Destination Layer menu, select the layer that contains the mouth positions for the character's voice track.

If the selected layer contains symbols, you can map the lip-sync using drawings located directly on the layer or use the symbol's frames. In the Symbol Layer field select Don't Use Any Symbol if you want to use the drawings or select the desired symbol from the drop-down menu.

In the Mapping section, type the drawing name or Symbol frames in the field to the right of the phoneme it represents. If your drawings are already named with the phoneme letters, you do not have to do anything.

Click OK.

Press the Play button in the Playback toolbar to see and hear the results in the Camera view. To play back your scene with sound, enable the Sound button in the Playback toolbar.

Harmony allows for the manual swapping of mouth position drawings to match a voice track. For this process, both sound scrubbing (listening to a sound wave broken up frame-by-frame) and drawing substitutions are used.